Following the airing of allegations by former counterterrorism "tsar"
Richard Clarke that the CIA deliberately withheld from him information about
Pentagon hijackers Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, former CIA director George
Tenet, former CIA Counterterrorist Center chief Cofer Black and Richard Blee,
a mid-level agency official who occupied two key counterterrorist positions
before 9/11, have responded with a joint statement.

Clarke said that information about the two men was deliberately withheld from
him in January 2000, at the time of a key al-Qaeda meeting in Kuala Lumpur,
Malaysia, which the CIA monitored. Clarke alleged that, based on his knowledge
of how the CIA works, Tenet authorised the deliberate withholding. Clarke added
that the information was clearly important in the summer of 2001, when the CIA
knew that Almihdhar was in the country and, in the words of one of Blee's
former deputies, was "very high interest" in connection with the
next al-Qaeda attack. However, the CIA continued to withhold some information
from both Clarke and the FBI.

Mark Rossini, one of Blee's former subordinates at Alec Station, the
CIA's bin Laden unit, has previously admitted deliberately withholding the
information from the FBI. According to Rossini, in early January 2000 he and
a colleague, Doug Miller, knew they should notify the FBI that Almihdhar had
a US visa and presumably intended to soon visit the US. Miller even drafted,
but did not send, a cable informing the FBI of Almihdhar's visa. However,
Rossini says he and Miller were instructed by a female CIA officer known as
"Michael" and Blee's deputy, Tom Wilshire, to withhold the
information.

The joint statement issued by these three men says that neither Tenet nor other
senior managers were aware of the visa information at all. Neither of the two
reports published after the attack, the heavily redacted 9/11 Congressional
Inquiry report and the 9/11 Commission Report--the CIA inspector general's
report is still secret, except the executive summary--give the "who
knew what when" for Almihdhar's visa information. However, several
CIA cables, readily accessible in the agency's database, mentioned the
visa.

Wilshire knew of the visa information; Blee almost certainly did, too. The
9/11 Commission Report states that Blee briefed his superiors, presumably including
Black, about the Malaysia meeting. However, it is unclear from the report or
any other source whether Blee mentioned the visa information. Some of the information
Blee gave his superiors about the meeting was wildly inaccurate. For example,
on January 12 he claimed the surveillance in Kuala Lumpur was still ongoing,
whereas in actual fact Alec Station had sent and received several cables stating
the attendees began to leave on January 8.

The joint statement quotes in support of its contention that senior management
did not know of the visa information part of a sentence from the 9/11 Commission
Report:

The 9/11 Commission quite correctly concluded that "...no one informed
higher levels of management in either the FBI or CIA about the case."

However, the ellipsis in the quote replaces the words,"It appears that,"
indicating the commission was not entirely sure. The quote concerns the search
for Almihdhar and his companion Nawaf Alhazmi in August and September 2001,
not the passage of the visa information in January 2000, and the chapter from
which it was taken was first drafted by Barbara Grewe, a Justice Department
inspector general and 9/11 Commission staffer who was subsequently hired by
a CIA contractor.

The statement, "The handling of the information in question was exhaustively
looked at by the 9/11 Commission, the Congressional Joint Inquiry, the CIA Inspector
General and other groups," is also questionable. The body of the CIA inspector
general's report is still secret so its contents are unknown, but the
9/11 Congressional Inquiry did not even find Miller's blocked cable, let
alone ask him about it, and the 9/11 Commission Report is silent on the vast
majority of specifics in Blee's briefings to his superiors.

The CIA's cable database contains records of who accessed what cable
when, and a statement on which Malaysia cables Tenet read would go some way
toward answering the question of what he knew. Blee's written briefings
would also be significant in this respect.

The lack of information the CIA leadership allegedly had in 2001's "summer
of threat" is even more puzzling. Tenet worked himself up into a near
frenzy in the months before 9/11, mostly based on unspecific chatter about a
forthcoming major bin Laden operation. For example, when Tenet demanded an immediate
meeting with National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice on July 10, 2001, when
Clarke, Black and Blee were also present, one of Tenet's best arguments
to support the idea that al-Qaeda would soon attack was, according to Tenet's
2007 book, "late June information that cited a 'big event'
that was forthcoming." This is not so meaningful compared to the information
the CIA had about Almihdhar and Alhazmi and should have presented to Clarke
and Rice.

By late August 2001 Wilshire, and almost certainly Blee, knew that Almihdhar
was in the US and Wilshire notified his CIA superiors that Almihdhar was "very
high interest" in connection with the next al-Qaeda attack. If this information
did not reach Tenet, as he claims, the appropriate question would again be:
who failed to pass it on?

Kevin Fenton is the author of Disconnecting the Dots: How CIA and FBI officials
helped enable 9/11 and evaded government investigations.

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